Volodin asked, “What is your objective in all this?”
Jack knew what he meant. Volodin was asking what it was that the United States wanted in return for not exposing the Russian government’s payment to the Seven Strong Men.
Ryan said, “It is very simple. Your armor stops where it is, and returns to the Crimea. You will have won a small victory, but any victory at all is more than you deserve. If that happens, we will not connect the dots between yourself and Zenith.”
“I cannot be blackmailed!”
“But you can be destroyed. Not by me. I don’t want war. But you can be destroyed from within. Russia needs to know who is at its helm. No one in Russia will believe me. But there is evidence. Evidence from Nesterov and Castor and other men, and the evidence will speak for itself, and it will get out there.”
“If you think I am afraid of your propaganda, you are mistaken.”
“President Volodin, the old guard still alive in the KGB will look into the dates. The bankers will look into the account numbers. The bureau of prisons will look into information on Talanov. Several European nations will reinvestigate old crimes. If it is my propaganda that starts the snowball, it will only be for a moment, at the top of the hill. Everything I say will be proven now that everyone knows where to look.”
Valeri Volodin hung up the phone.
An aide came on the line a second later. “Mr. President, shall I try to get him back?”
“No, thank you,” Ryan said. “I delivered my message. Now we have to wait to see his response to it.”
—
Roman Talanov resigned from the FSB two days after Russia ceased offensive operations in Ukraine and pulled forces back to the Crimea. Typical of his career in government service, Talanov made no announcement himself; instead, Valeri Volodin went before his favorite news presenter, and after accepting high praise for his successes in stamping out terrorism in eastern Ukraine, he said he had a very unfortunate announcement to make.
“I have decided I have lost confidence in Roman Romanovich Talanov. Disturbing facts have come to light about his dealings with organized crime, and as the person responsible for the integrity of all Russian citizens, I recognize Talanov is not the right man for the job.”
Volodin appointed a man no one had ever heard of—he himself picked him from a cabal of trusted advisers, though the man had no intelligence experience—and he ordered Talanov’s name removed from all official correspondence.
—
Roman Talanov knew what it meant to be a disgraced vory. There was no more dangerous position in all of Russia, because everyone he had surrounded himself with became, in the blink of an eye, the very people most hazardous to him. He retreated to his dacha in Krasnodar Krai, on the Black Sea coast, with a security staff of twenty trusted men, and he armed them all from an armory of weapons stolen from a KGB Spetsnaz unit.
Valeri Volodin sent an emissary—he would not speak with Talanov himself—and assured him he would have government protection and all the proceeds from selling his Gazprom shares, in exchange for making no public announcements.
Talanov agreed. He had been following the orders of Valeri Volodin for more than thirty years; he really didn’t know how to do anything else.
It was a member of his own staff who killed him. Six days after Talanov was outed as a KGB officer who misrepresented himself to earn vory v zakonye status, one of the junior members of his guard force, a civilian who secretly aspired to great things in the Seven Strong Men, waited for Talanov to step out of his shower and then stabbed him through the heart with a dagger. He took pictures of the body with his cell phone, and posted them on social media to brag of the event.
There was a special irony in the fact that the first image most Russians ever saw of the former intelligence chief was of his bloody naked body lying faceup on a tile floor, his eyes wide in death.
—
Jack Ryan, Jr., called his father from the back of the Hendley Associates jet when he was over the Atlantic. His dad had been worried about him for the past week for the simple reason that Jack had gone to London to move out of his flat, and even with Dom and Sam to help him, it still took a little time.
Jack didn’t want to call his dad while he was still in the UK. Instead, he called his mom and sent e-mails, assuring them both that he’d be home soon.
Dom and Sam loved the UK, and Jack had to admit he was going to miss it greatly. He recognized it was his own melancholy when he arrived that had made his time here tough going at first, long before the Russian mob made the experience even less cheery.
But now he was on his way home, which meant he could talk to his father without having to hear all the concern in his voice that Jack had heard so much of the past few years. He realized he made his dad’s tough life even tougher by his choice of profession, but he also realized one other thing.
If there was anyone on earth who understood the need to serve a greater good despite personal danger, it was his own father.
—
After establishing the fact that his son’s next stop would be the United States of America, Jack Senior said, “Son, I haven’t had a chance to thank you for passing me all the intel last week. You turned the tide. You damn well saved a lot of lives.”
Jack Junior wasn’t patting his own back, though. “I don’t know, Dad. Volodin is still alive and in power. They are dancing in the streets in the parts of Ukraine where he is now the head honcho. Doesn’t quite feel like a victory.”
Ryan said, “It’s not the ending any of us wanted. But we stopped a war.”
“Are you sure you didn’t just delay it?”
Jack Senior sighed. “No. I’m not sure at all. In fact, in some ways a weakened Volodin is even more dangerous. He might be like a wounded animal. Ready to lash out at anything. But I’ve been at this sort of thing for a while, and I feel like we maximized benefit and minimized detriment. A lot of good people lost their lives over this: Sergey, Oxley, men in and out of uniform serving in Eastern Europe. It’s okay to wish we got more out of this, but the real world bites back.”
“Yeah,” Jack Junior said. “It does.”
Jack Senior said, “We didn’t lose, Jack. We just didn’t win.”
That sank in after a moment. “Okay.”
Ryan asked, “What’s your plan now, son?”
“I want to come home. I’ve talked to Gerry already. He found a new building in Fairfax County, and Gavin has come up with some new technology to help us move forward.”
Ryan said, “That’s good. I know you miss working with the team. I can’t say I don’t wish you would live a safer life, though.”
Jack Junior said, “You saw what happened when I took a boring job with no chance for danger.”
“Yeah, I did. I sent you off after some of that danger, didn’t I?”
“You trusted me. I appreciate that. Thanks.”
“You bet, sport. Drop by as soon as you can when you get home. I miss you.”
“I will, Dad. I miss you, too.”
EPILOGUE
Thirty years earlier
CIA analyst Jack Ryan climbed out of the taxi in front of his house on Grizedale Close. He’d borrowed a coat from a colleague at Century House, and he was glad he had, because it was a cold night here in Chatham. The street was empty, and he figured it had to have been after midnight, but he’d taken his watch off in Berlin when the doctor treated his injury, and he’d thrown it in his suitcase after that.
It had occurred to him on the train from Victoria Station that he should have called home from his office. Instead Sir Basil had insisted he get his forearm looked over by their doctor, and then, after that, he’d spent hours reviewing a facsimile of a copy of the contact report he’d written that morning at Mission Berlin. His first draft ran some eleven pages, and while reading it at Century House he’d added another five pages of information, using a map of Berlin and some other reference materials to help him get every detail just right.
; He’d been too distracted to call Cathy then, and by the time he thought of it he was already on the train.
He entered through the front door as quietly as he could; he didn’t want to wake the kids. He put his luggage down in the foyer and started to take off his shoes so he could step even a little more quietly, but he heard Cathy moving up the hall in the dark.
Cathy all but leapt into his arms. “I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you, too.”
It was a tender moment, broken only by “Did you get a new coat?”
“Oh. It’s borrowed. Long story.”
They hugged and kissed all the way to the living room, where Cathy sat on the couch. She looked beautiful to him, even in her housecoat. Jack pulled off his coat, forgetting that his right forearm looked like it had been mummified.
“Oh my God. What did you do?”
Jack shrugged. He couldn’t lie to Cathy, because she was his wife, but he also couldn’t lie to her because she was a surgeon. She’d take one look at his forearm and know that he’d been slashed by a knife.
Within seconds, she had the bandages unwrapped and held his arm up to the light from the lamp on the end table. She examined it with a practiced eye. “You are lucky, Jack. It’s long, but it’s not deep at all. It looks like someone did a good job dressing it.”
“Yes.”
She started rewrapping it. “I’ll clean it again and rebandage it in the morning. What happened?”
“I can’t say.”
She looked at the injury, then up into his eyes with an expression that was one of both concern and hurt. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“I can’t,” he repeated himself, imploring her to not dig any deeper.
And this told her most everything she needed to know. “The only reason you wouldn’t be able to tell me is that this had something to do with the CIA. Were you attacked?”
You might say that, he thought. But not just by the German terrorist with the knife. There was also the little matter of the sniper and the unknown goons by the Berlin Wall. He didn’t say any of this, of course. Instead, he just said, “I’m fine, babe. I promise.”
She did not believe him. “I’ve been watching the news. The restaurant in Switzerland. The art gallery in Berlin. Jesus, Jack, which one was it?”
Ryan could have said “Both,” or he could have been pedantic and pointed out that it wasn’t actually an art gallery. Instead, he said, “You have to believe me, Cathy. I didn’t go looking for any trouble.”
“You never do. You just can’t turn away from it when it presents itself.”
Jack looked across the room. He was too tired for a fight, and there wasn’t much he could say, anyway. She was right. She didn’t marry a soldier or a spy. She married a commodities trader and a historian. He was the one getting himself into situations like Berlin. He had no valid argument that Berlin came looking for him.
He said the only thing he could think of, and it was truly the only thing that mattered to him now: “I love you, and I’m glad to be home.”
“I love you too, Jack, and I like having you around. Which is why it’s so damn difficult when you are gone for days, and then come home with a knife wound. Please tell me you understand that.”
“Of course I do.”
They hugged. There was nothing about this matter that was resolved, really, but she showed him she was going to let it go for now.
Cathy said, “I’m sorry, but I have surgery at nine.”
Jack looked at the time. One a.m. The night before at this time, he’d been sitting with Marta Scheuring, and two nights earlier he’d been minutes away from a gun battle. Three nights earlier he’d stood in Zug, Switzerland, watching a building burn.
Jack kissed his wife, and she headed to the bedroom. He called after her, “I’ll be right in after I check on the kids.”
—
Ryan looked in on little Sally. She was sound asleep, with her stuffed bunny clutched tightly. He stepped in silently and kissed her on her forehead.
Next he leaned into little Jack’s room, and he was surprised to see his toddler standing up in the crib. Under a shock of black hair were wide blue eyes and a big smile for his daddy.
Ryan laughed softly. “Hey, sport.” He picked Jack up and hugged him, then carried his little boy into the living room, where he sat on the sofa with the boy on his lap.
It was quiet in the room even with the ticking of the clock, and as Ryan sat there he felt his son’s heartbeat against his own chest.
Suddenly the danger and death of the past few days rushed to the front of his mind. His life had been on the line multiple times, and now his own heart pounded in terror with the knowledge that he could have lost everything he had, everything he held.
And his family could have lost him.
He squeezed Jack tighter, and the little boy squirmed in his arms.
He told himself he had to get away from this life before little Jack and little Sally lost their father.
As he sat there contemplating his own mortality and what he suddenly saw as the irresponsibility of playing fast and loose with his life, he thought not only of the peril he had been in, but also of others. Of David Penright, of the two Swiss bankers he’d never even met, the innocents killed in Switzerland and Germany, and he thought of Ingrid Bretz, of Marta, and of the man who’d come out of the trees to step in to help a stranger, at great danger to himself.
Jack got into this intelligence game to make the world a better place. It was naive, he had the self-awareness to admit this, but at the end of the day, he knew he’d done some good. Maybe not much, but hell, he was just one man, and he was doing his best.
He looked down at Jack Junior again, and was pleased to see he’d fallen asleep, just like that, right there in his arms.
Ryan knew he could not walk away from doing his best. He would do whatever he could to stay safe so that he could live a long life and provide for his family, but he realized now that the more he did himself, the harder he fought to make this world a better place, the greater the chance the world Jack Junior would inherit would be just a little better off, and a little safer for him.
Jack figured his own late father, a Baltimore cop named Emmet Ryan, had probably held him in his arms and thought the same thing. Hell, it was every father’s wish, though he wondered how hopeful it might be. For all Ryan knew, little Jack would face dangers Ryan himself could never imagine, but as he stood up and carried his sleeping son back to his room, he realized every father owed it to his children to try.
—
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